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CD Review

Boston-born Irving Fine's (1914-1962) unfortunate demise at forty-seven deprived the classical music world of an extremely promising talent. A superb teacher and administrator, he was also an accomplished pianist, conductor and composer, who owing to his early death completed only six orchestral works. Now for the first time we get all of them on one disc with this hybrid, CD(2)/SACD(2/5.0), disc from BMOP/sound in their acclaimed series devoted to twentieth century American composers (see 14 May 2014).

Andrew Norman (b. 1979) studied at USC, where he currently teaches, and then at Yale. He lives in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, traditionally the most dangerous part of the city (I guess it's been gentrified by now). He has been a contributor to New York's Bang On a Can group as well. The combination of those locales tells a great deal about Mr Norman's work, for which he was a recent Pulitzer Prize finalist.

Elena Ruehr studied with Persichetti at Julliard and Bolcom at the University of Michigan. These are all her works for orchestra.

Shimmer (1995), for strings, moves in harmonically static blocks of diatonic counterpoint. It is a glowing (shimmering) dance with grace and a folk-like feel, elegant and Coplandesque, with a dash for minimalism for flavor.

The title of the Boston Modern Orchestra Project's superb disc of music by Elena Ruehr is 'O'Keeffe Images', which refers to her triptych of works inspired by paintings of Georgia O'Keeffe. They are wondrous pieces, abounding in sonorous awe, grandeur and imagination, as befits the images that stimulated the American composer. A similar sense of urgent brilliance pervades the three Ruehr works preceding the O'Keeffe collection.

"Curious, isn’t it, that the last really great symphony…was Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements, date 1945, exactly coincident with the end of World War Two? It is as though that apocalyptic bomb had demolished not only Hiroshima but, as a side effect, the whole tonal symphonic concept as well.

And so for the last thirty years we have had no real symphonic history."

When Elena Ruehr (b. 1963) received her musical education (University of Michigan and The Juilliard School) in the late 1980s, melody wasn’t even considered as a part of modern music theory classes. Fortunately, one of her teachers—George Balch Wilson—recognized her gift for it. Now she sees melody as “the most complex and human of musical experiences.” Raised in a family of amateur musicians (her mother sang folk music and early jazz standards), she learned the piano at age five. Her passion as a dancer infuses her music with a distinctive rhythmic pulse.

I have already mentioned a few times here of the extraordinary work of the Boston Modern Orchestra Project and its leader Gil Rose and its label (41 discs since 2008!). This time, it offers us the music of Andrew Norman, an explosive composer in his mid-thirties, which was developed during a two-year residency with the orchestra. The 46-minute Play explores brilliantly the possible modes of play of the orchestra, playing the musicians either together or against each other, for example.

Spratlan’s musical version of A Summer’s Day (2008), commissioned and premiered by BMOP, has the instant nostalgia of a strongly evoked, specific time and place. His “Pre-Dawn Nightmare” includes fragments of the theme song to The Sopranos; “At the Computer” evokes the sounds of an already-obsolete desktop machine. And the connective tissue of the piece, the folk-like tune presented at the outset (“Hymn to the Summer Solstice”), is a memory of summer romanticized into an abstraction.

“Play,” which the Boston Modern Orchestra Project commissioned from the fast-rising composer Andrew Norman in 2013, is being talked about as the most important long orchestral work of the 21st century. That kind of hype can often be misleading, but in this case it’s quite likely accurate. The 45-minute, three-movement work, which encompasses various meanings of play — some lighthearted, some sinister — begins in an almost spastic fit of energy; musical ideas ricochet off one another furiously, almost too quickly.